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Cronan

CronanIvan the Terrible

Biography

Niner since 2004

Cronan is a London-based developer in the finance industry, currently working at "The Hedge Fund That Cannot Be Named". A long-time VB devotee, he was converted to the C# world about two years ago and has never looked back.

Check me out on the web at Ivan's World.

Comments

It's easy to get side-tracked by all the details. I see it like this; when IE 4.01 came out looking and working better than the equivalent version of Netscape, I embraced it, but with a caveat: if Microsoft achieve market dominance with this (free) product,
then they might well rest on their laurels, never implementing the w3c standards, never tightening up scurity, basically allowing the product to drift. Unfortunately, I was right, and this is where the anger I feel comes from. While many on the IE blog are
Linux/Mozilla fanboys, many are existing Microsoft users who (like me) love the products, but feel cheated by Microsoft management's very poor attitude towards IE over the last three years.

I've found that using overloading in C# is a lot easier and cleaner than using optional params in VB.
That said, the lack of optional params in C# becomes a REAL issue when automating any Office apps via Interop, where masses of optional params are very common.

Come to think of it, COM Interop on Office applications is so nasty I tend to stay far away at the best of times.

It would be really nice if the adherence to standards would extend to things like css in IE. I'm also not convinced by the argument about "different customers"; I can't see how people would actually want products that have incomplete or broken implementations
of standards, given a choice. I think Dare's example about implementing support for negative regex expressions is a good one - it's nice to know that people are at least trying to support some parts of some of the standards.

You'll also be able to use Internet Explorer like the "above average" folks...and not be tied down to only using javascripts on eBay.

I totally agree. The clip doesn't even come close to being "the top things".

On the other hand, it's worth remembering that the clips we're seeing are the exact opposite of prepared interviews. The answers aren't prepared in any way. think about what you might say if someone dropped by your desk with a camera!

Instead of doing lots of customer research to generate the "How do I"'s, why not just improve the search? This is only going to be of limited use. The moment that the thing you want to do is not in the "How do I" list, and you don't know the whole API
off by heart, you're stuck with trying the Search, which, let's face it, sux big-time.

Your search needs to be as good (or close to) as Google.
MSDN search is poor. It was poor 5 years ago, it looks worse now.

There was an earlier post - about how some developers "know the API" and some don't, and the MSDN/VS search was geared towards the ones who do.
I took real exception to this, probably because I'm in the group of people who don't know every API in MSDN that I want to use. But seriously? What a crock! Basically, you're saying that the current search is so poor that only people who don't really need to
use it will find it useful??

Another thing - it's not just the MSDN/VS help that's poor - it's also Winhelp.

I love aggregators. I've used SharpReader, but found it a little slow, a little weighty for just reading news.
I now use the RSS Reader Panel extension in Firefox
RSS 2.0 is fine for now. MS should keep an eye on Atom ...